:: Partition functions poorly ::

Friday, March 17, 2006

Independent Online Edition > Fry uncovers Indian maths genius's role in digital age

Ramanujan excelled in number theory and modular functions. He also made significant contributions to the development of partition functions and summation formulas involving constants such as pi.

Wikipedia: Srinivasa Ramanujan

He excelled in number theory and modular functions. He also made significant contributions to the development of partition functions and summation formulas involving constants such as pi.

When I realized that the Independent's Leonard Doyle had lifted these sentences directly from Wikipedia* I underwent a see-saw positional shift:

1. How dare he. This is plagiarism.
2. No, it's not plagiarism, this is exactly what Wikipedia was intended to be and there are no restrictions on using information contained therein.
3. That's not entirely accurate. According to the GNFDL covering all contributions to Wikipedia, Doyle's article falls short of satisfying requirements on two counts. First, it fails to attribute the quote. Second, information must retain the right to be "copied, modified, and redistributed", an allowance his column's publisher does not grant by failing to label the quoted text as such, thereby implicitly applying the paper's rather more strict IP grip.

Really, it all could have been sidestepped with the simple camouflage of paraphrasing. But then again I'm not qualified to impugn laziness on the part of others.

A note on how pathetic my pointing this out could be perceived as being: it's actually worse than you think. A boss of mine used to jest by coming by my desk late in the day and asking for "one last thing: can you make sure to fact-check the whole web before you head out?"

*last change to the Wikipedia entry as of now (3/13) predates publication of the article (3/17)

Posted by morland @ 11:30 AM

:: Comments ::

It's sad how so much plagiarism seems to circle around the Wikipedia. Between the plagiarized articles appearing on the site and the other writers plagiarizing from it, it can feel as if all of the content there is either stolen or being stolen.

This of course, is not true but one has to wonder why the Wikipedia has fallen victim to plagiarism so many times in so many ways.

Posted by: Jonathan Bailey on March 17, 2006 12:43 PM

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